Steven Campbell (artist)

Steven Campbell (1953–2007) was a painter from Scotland.

Campbell was born in the Burnside district of Rutherglen, attended the town's Academy and worked as an engineer at Clydebridge Steelworks before studying at Glasgow School of Art as a mature student, from 1978 to 1982. Initially he studied the then still new subject of performance art, but quickly gave this up for painting.

At the end of his studies he was awarded the Bram Stoker gold medal, and gained a Fulbright Scholarship which he used to go to New York to study at the Pratt Institute. This move resulted in many of his early exhibitions taking place in New York, including his first solo show, in 1983, at the Barbara Toll Gallery.

There is some dispute as to whether Campbell was one of the core group of students nurtured by the artist and tutor Alexander Moffat at Glasgow School of Art, including Peter Howson and Ken Currie, but Campbell was certainly included by Moffat in the 1981 group show The Vigorous Imagination at the New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh, later known as the Fruitmarket Gallery, which was the first public showing of this group. He was also included in the seminal exhibition at Glasgow's Third Eye Centre entitled New Image Glasgow, again curated by Moffat, which is still regarded as an exemplar in how a non-metropolitan centre can promote art and culture on the international stage. In this exhibition Moffat presented Campbell and other Glasgow artists as a 'New Scottish School'. He was also included in the 1985 Hayward Annual exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery, London, and had a joint show with the British Pop Artist Colin Self at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

Campbell returned to live in Glasgow in 1986, and that same year his painting The Dangerous Early and Late Life of Lytton Strachey was acquired by The Tate. The following year he was included in a group show, also called The Vigorous Imagination New Scottish Art held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Festival, at which he cemented his elevated status within the new Scottish art world by being one of the most prominently displayed artists. 1987 was also the year of his first exhibition of paintings with the London art gallery Marlborough Fine Art. This was only Campbell's second solo show in London, the first having been at the Riverside Studios in 1984. In 1988, Campbell's painting A Man Perceived by a Flea, painted in 1985, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery,

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